Stone bar tops in Broad Green

Yes. Broad Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are CR0. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. A bar fit runs longer than a worktop run, because the frame, the support and the stone are three stages and only the last of them is quick. A bar top left on a pavement is a bar top with a chipped nose. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The partitions put in at conversion are studwork standing on the old floor, so they take a fixing well but carry nothing, and a heavy end panel needs a different answer. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. Blockwork holds a fixing and plasterboard does not. A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. On a bar that counts twice over, because the same obstruction has to be cleared by the stone above it and by the knees of whoever is sitting at it. A bar pushed sideways was fixed to plasterboard.

The measurement that decides everything is the diagonal between the underside of the flight above and the outer edge of the turn below it. That matters more on a bar than on a run, because a join forced by the way in cannot be allowed to land in the unsupported part of the nose. Front tier and back tier are carried and set as two pieces. A single red line has hours and a double red line does not, and the difference decides whether an early start is a plan or a penalty. That has to cover more than the unload, since the corbels, the flat bar and the fixings all come off the van well before the top does. What comes off the van first is whatever holds the top up.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop fabrication and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. Rooms in a shared house are let individually, so the work has to be done around whoever is still living in the building. A bar is nearly always the last thing added to a project, so it is templated on a visit of its own once the joinery around it has stopped moving. Drinks left standing decide the material more than looks do. A landlord ordering several kitchens at once is buying a specification once and then repeating it, so the early decisions are worth taking slowly. Where the same detail is repeating across several rooms the support gets standardised once and then cut to length, which is cheaper than drawing it each time. A bar is the piece most likely to be added after the kitchen.

The two runs are read against each other rather than against the floor, so they are set to one datum taken across the aisle instead of measured up from the boards. A bar laid over that is a second level rather than a wider one, so it wants a spine underneath it and a settled detail where the two heights meet. The bar is set out from the seat and worked back to the units. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Where the boxing stands proud of the finished wall the upstand behind it has to be broken into separate lengths, because one piece cannot pass it. Where the nose has to be carried past something fixed the support moves rather than the stone, since a corbel landing in the knee space is worse than no corbel at all. Every obstruction under the top is a seating decision too. Send the length you want, the number of stools, and photographs walking from the pavement through to the room, including the cellar stair if the bar is going down there. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. Where the person choosing it is not the person who will lean on it, the seating height is set to a standard rather than to whoever happens to be standing in the room. A chipped front edge can be dressed in place.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. Anything that puts a notch in a bar takes material out of the piece at the point people lean on it, so the notch and the support are drawn together or not at all. The riser is boxed to a line the stone can follow.

Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. The flat entrance door is a certified fire door on a closer, and taking it off for an hour means dealing with the seals and the closer before the day ends. In a cellar the headroom fixes the counter height first and everything else works back from it, and the stair down is the tightest part of the route because stone carried downward is harder to control than stone carried up. A trade bar and a home bar are different pieces of work.

Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. A galley that is also the route to the back door is a corridor first and a kitchen second, and what the shape can take is set by the traffic going through it. The seating side is the part that decides the piece, because a stool at the open end puts a load on a corner that a wall would otherwise have been carrying. A foot rail is planned with the frame, not bolted on later.

Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. A counter fixed back to lightweight framing takes a sideways push as well as a downward load, and framing built for neither gets noggins let into it first. Steel spans what a carcass cannot.